Thursday, April 28, 2011

Past Experience sometimes is the biggest hurdle. It CONDITIONS our mind. Previous patterns determine our future actions. Life is an explorations and conditioned mind cant explore but just follow the trend. This applies to individuals and enterprises equally.

Therefore to unCONDITION our mind we need to be alert of our thoughts & actions. Out of the Box or Lateral Thinking is all about this. Everyone be it individual or company becomes prisoner of this "following the pattern" habit. This is how we become stale after sometime.

Challenge is to get out of this and rejuvenate our thoughts on an ongoing basis:

5) Do something non routine daily.(take new route to office or home, buy non regular magazine, go to movie with not so good review, watch channel not viewed regularly, offer peak season discount on products and services, pay yr supplier early and thank them for the support, celebrate achievement of family members of employees, ask back office team to front end the customers, respond to call center queries in 48 minutes instead of 48 hours, offer no question asked goods return for a day, call customer after a day of his purchase to know whether he is happy with product or service

4) Challenge Obvious Idea / Action / Interpretation. (Get feedback from suppliers, service providers, go to different restaurant, take no reason leave from the job and be with the family, have without appointments day for all patients, go and play cricket with children on Sunday, )

3) Think , apply your mind and look at the things in different perspective.(Talk to grieving customers or employees by calling him and giving full attention to know his perspectives)

2) For the sake of change do something differently. (Offer Lassi or lemon juice in place of routine Tea/Coffee to your customers /employees)

1) Check Business Processes more often for better customer experiences. Its a dynamic world, processes must be reviewed to achieve speed & convenience to customers.(Remove or merge processes, add delight factor in the process)

Many more such actions can be taken up routinely to un( Condition + Routine ) our mind. Daily Targets ,Quarterly Results and Annual Bonus will make it difficult to think anything other than routine but believe me thinking unroutine will improve all the three targets.

Friday, April 22, 2011

As a part of my selection of case studies on customer experience & social media I request CEOs and Business Owners (or for that matter anyone interested) to share their views on following six AWAKENERs:

6) How often CUSTOMER xperience & feedback are on yr internal meeting agenda?

Always, Sometime, seldom , never

5) Do U have someone fully end to end in charge of Customer Experience?

Thursday, April 21, 2011

"Focus of most marketing spend is usually around new customer acquisition and that only 20% of marketing budgets are typically spent on retention. Yet, in many cases, 75% of revenues comes from existing customers." (Book : Flip to Funnel)

Wow! Customer Xperience is NOW more relevant in times of powerful Social Media. Words Spreads with electrifying speed and across d globe - Good or Bad.

Every wants to share their experiences. Social Media is providing them many such platforms.Are we providing them enough (any) food for thought abt what to write/share with their friends, followers and group members ???If we are not , customers have their own opinions. They will share.

Every customer is also a publisher. (FB, Tweet, U Tube , LinkedIn , Blog) Any clue what to do to get ur offerings published?

Unfortunately the pace at which economy (due to technology) wants us to react is so fast that human species will take time to adjust. Like the versions of the IT products we also need advance versions of people who can take on the technology and can react and move at speed of thought. I am not talking abt development of technology but the speed at which things in the world happens due to sophistication of technology is the KILLER.

Technology is just a one part, problem with CAPITALIST society is that Capital is d only measurement of success.All our measurements of success surrounds CAPITAL. ROI, IRR, EBIDTA, EPS, ROCE, PBT , EVA and that's it. Failure or success is defined by these figures. PERIOD.

Which company actually measures stress or happiness of the employees , suppliers (Quick deliveries and delayed payment) & customers on an on going basis and actually work towards improving the happiness and lowering the stress? No Annual Reports talks about people's happiness or customers happiness due to the existence of the enterprise. People talks about triple bottom line (one each for Shareholders, Society and Environment).We have regulator like SEBI and minister like Jairam Ramesh so two of the three are looked after to some extent (environment reporting is negligible). Society incl people (HR) and customer influenced by the Enterprise is invariably ignored.

Companies in the US like Zapoos is one of the very few who has taken up HAPPINESS as an objective of their existence and they are working on delivering happiness not just to their customers but to people across the globe.

Unless the focus changes things will not change. Unless we care abt the people more than the shareholders things will not change. Unless our annual reports are driven by people, customers and society at large than by Companies Act things will not change. Which company will wake up first?? Infosys did it once on governance and reporting transparency. Who will take the lead this time? Are we not extremely conditioned!!!

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Never ever start any project without financial closure. Short term approach that lets manage till we need additional moneyinvariablywill puncture (Cost and time overrun, cost of finance will go up in a emergency situation and not so well thought out decisions in desperation) the project.

Don't forget the lesson of 2008 crisis, take money when available and not when u need it. You may not use the available money in full and pay interest or commitment charges , but that is a better scenario than no money and project suffers.

Seen this and seeing again and again.

(Not appliable to start ups, they need to manage from whatever sources till they dilute to professional investors)